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41

Well, that’s hardly Adobes fault now is it…? Photoshop sets a bench mark - so someone needs to better it.
PSD - locked into Adobe? Nope - Gimp, Affinity and others.
Whereas RT is by far the best raw processor in existence today, GIMP is not the best RIP - Ps is.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Adobe, all they ever do is cost me money! But in return I get the best rip, DAM & print facilities out there - IMO of course.

I fail to understand the mentality which stops one from using the best tools just because you don’t like the production companies business model!

Pre CC, Adobe Photoshop and Creative suite were just about the most pirated bits of software out there - I seem to remember a figure of 65% of all Ps installations were illegal. No matter what Adobe did to secure their software the hackers/crackers were two steps ahead.

Going with the subscription model certainly reduced the illegal usage. But you are no more ‘locked in’ now than you were before.

I use Camtasia to do all my screen recordings for YouTube - what a bunch of swine they are, they make me pay them money for a license. Then, shock horror, the screen recording file is a bloody proprietary format!

Why don’t I use OBS and do the job at no cost?

OBS doesn’t have a built-in editor - Camtasia does. OBS is clunky and complex, Camtasia is streamlined and easy to use. I need other ‘stuff’ to make the finished video using OBS, with Camtasia I don’t.

So for convenience AND quality I spend the dough.

This is the way the world works.

And then there is the exception to the rule - RT.
Not only should all the other raw processor producers be bloody ashamed of themselves, but all alternative software developers - free or paid for - should see it as a standard by which their product should stand or fall: to be an alternative to something your product HAS to be AS good or BETTER than what you are attempting to replace.

And it’s not just RT - look at Open Office.

And as for getting shafted by Adobe jacking the monthly sub and turning Photoshop and Lightroom into ransom ware, my subs have gone up by 1/8th since the model began - I wish my wife could say the same about a loaf of bread or our other household bills.

4 Likes
42

All the arguing about the “best” is sort of silly; I see this kind of argument all the time. The software is the “best” because you have put in the time to learn it and you can wield it effectively enough to complete the task you’ve set out to do. From a purely task-basd view, GIMP can do everything I need to, and thus is equal-- arguing about it in the abstract is pretty pointless.

Of course, from the Free Software perspective, the price is the least of one’s worries. The creative cloud is riddled with bugs, and I can’t see the source code, so they can’t be fixed, and Adobe seems like they hardly care to fix them, from my own personal experience trying to report bugs.

Then, there is the fact that someday you could just loose access to the software, even if you can afford to pay for it, just ask Venezuela.

This isn’t really the way the software industry is trending. It used to work that way, but Free Software is a slow burn process; it isn’t good enough until one day it is, and then bam! The commercial alternative is toast.

Libre Office.

But also Apache, the Linux Kernel, gnu libc & musl! Remember when you had to pay for a C compiler? That company was huge… Do they even exist anymore?

3 Likes
43

Good point!

That’s nitpicking for the sake of it imho :frowning:

44

Both continue to exist, although LibreOffice seems to be a lot more active.

45

Hello everyone,

Both continue to exist, although LibreOffice seems to be a lot more active.

LibreOffice is way more active and developed.
OpenOffice is no really active; IMHO is actually stagnant since many years if you ask me…
Just take a look at the features of the upcoming version 7.0 [1] of LIbreOffice to judge for yourself.

At work, a very big public sector, in North Italy, we have switched to Linux on hundreds of computers. We have opted for LibreOffice (and GIMP) :slight_smile:

On some computers, with Leica softwares to handle our microscopes in the laboratory, we still run Windows 10 though. However, I have installed also RawTherapee and GIMP on them :slight_smile:

Unfortunately, we can not donate easily to RawTherapee on PayPal due to the usual Italian paperworks nightmare stuff…

[1] LibreOffice 7.0: Release Notes - The Document Foundation Wiki

46

I’m a little late to the party. However, I have a few comments to add if anyone is interested :slight_smile:

Registering a legal organization in The Netherlands is a piece of cake at least. Easiest option would be to start a foundation. It only costs you a one-time fee at a notary if you keep the statutes fairly simple. Things do get a bit more complicated if you want to generate large profits and/or hire people. Otherwise, there are quite some options to have something low key and a bit more reliable than donating to a private person.

My remaining comments are more or less off-topic. Excuse me if this gets out of hand :roll_eyes:

There are plenty of brands that make it into our language as verbs. Is it unhealthy that ‘googling’ is a word? There were plenty of other search engines around before Google, but once something is done right, and becomes popular, things logically tend to stick. The corresponding market share is (mostly) rightly earned imo.
I don’t know why ‘coreldrawing’ or ‘corel photopainting’ hasn’t picked up or ‘paintshoppro-ing’… Unfortunately, ‘gimping’ doesn’t sound right.

First, isn’t any tool as good as its users? Second, like @paperdigits also argues, what determines ‘the best’ is very subjective and also a very fluid concept. I never liked working with Photoshop and always preferred how Jasc (not so much Corel!) PaintShop Pro worked. I used to never like the way GIMP worked, but I have grown accustomed to it. Do I think of any of these as ‘the best’ raster image editor? Not really. Do I think that Photoshop and PaintShop Pro are too expensive for my (very amateur) needs? Most certainly yes. Consider your goal, then choose the right tool.

This is highly debatable. Finding an attractive unique selling point is often much more effective to lose your competition. That USP could be making your software free, while the competition is still expensive (DaVinci Resolve), or producing relevant search results fast (Google vs. Yahoo/Altavista/…). There are probably countless examples more.

I actually think trying to outdo your competition by trying to replace it, in terms or sheer amount of functionality done ‘better’ or somehow having a greater ease of use, is futile. Be unique, play to your strengths and adapt to user’s needs. A great example of this is imo darktable which has seen quite a revolution in recent times. The developers are actively listening and interacting with their users, and simultaneously getting more unique because of the filmic processing, working more in linear RGB space and whatnot. Is that called becoming/being ‘better’? I doubt it. Will darktable dominate the market for raw processing because of this? Likely not with the mainstream popularity of Lightroom. Is it gaining in popularity, though? I think so. Will RawTherapee see a decline in its userbase because of this? Maybe (or maybe RT needs to evolve as well in some way).

47

I recently bought a X-Rite product and they offered me a 1 year free subscription to Adobe Photoshop CC. Great, let’s have a look since v5 or 6! I live in France, my laptop is in French, but I can’t change the interface language to English for example, the only option available is French. I don’t know if that’s a bug, but I do know that other software, like Gimp or RT or ART or Darktable do not show this problem…

48

You’re preaching to the choir on this! :smiley: I was just trying to be polite to OpenOffice. I’ve been using LibreOffice on both Linux and Windows ever since the events that caused LibreOffice to come into existence.

49

I actually don’t know about the amount of money currently available by donations to RT. But regardless of the amount, I vote to donate it to help people in Beirut!

Of course that’s only my point of view. Can’t speak for other RT contributers.

4 Likes
50

This paypal link for donating to RT project doesn’t seem operational (within paypal). Does anyone know if this is still operational?

51

Seems like it works for me.

52

Seems like it works for me too…

Edit: thanks for the link, I didn’t know that before.

53

Oh, OK. So it must be some local paypal issue for me.
Thanks anyway @paperdigits

54

Hello,
I would like to donate something for the fantastic good software RawTherapee - but I am completely overwhelmed how to do it. Maybe everything was already described above, but unfortunately it did not open up to me how to do it.

55

@micha: click the link shown above, it will redirect you to a paypal-account of Maciej Dworak. If you click “send” you will be asked to login at paypal. Here you can decide how much to donate. finish the transfer, thats it.

56

grafik
what do you have to select? Anfordern (Request) or Senden (Send)?
It seems both lead to the same thing. Sorry, I’m a bit unsure about this as I want to send money away and have very little control over where it arrives.

57

you want so send money, so click senden, you are sending to Maciej and after transfer you will receive a Paypal-email with all the information about this transfer.

58

Danke Martin,
Worked. Thank you very much for the help.
Only: I am horrified how much PayPal keeps for itself. That is a great pity. Is everything in this world really only about such financial service providers? Do you know why you can’t just transfer money to a developer’s account?

59

this is what paypal keeps for themselves ( i estimate, your native language is german?):

Für alle anderen persönlichen Zahlungen berechnet Paypal eine Gebühr in Höhe von 5 Prozent der Transaktionssumme, wobei mindestens Kosten in Höhe von 99 Cent und maximal in Höhe von 3,99 Euro pro Transaktion berechnet werden. Die Gebühr zahlt dabei grundsätzlich der Absender und über die anfallenden Gebühren wird der Absender auch vor der Tätigung der Zahlung informiert.

May be you could transfer to ad devs account but its his decision, not to show his account data in public.

60

I won’t say your money is wasted, but please be aware that the person you’re donating to hasn’t visited this forum since August 10 and has not been active on the RawTherapee GitHub page since August 13 (and also very infrequently before that).